Hurricane Sandy: A daring rescue in the Jersey Shore town of Seaside Heights

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. -- Brian and Amy Dardis decided to stay at their two-blocks-from-the-beach Kearney Avenue home in Seaside Heights and ride out Hurricane Sandy. And everything was going OK. Until it wasn't.

"Water just started rushing down the street. Front and back of the house, water started coming in, and we're five steps up," Amy said. "It was too late to go anywhere. I went to the attic to bring things up there. We had a generator running outside the house, so Brian stepped outside to check on it. Then he heard voices."

Brian Dardis is a retired Newark firefighter, and a volunteer in his year-round residence in Seaside Heights. He called back to the voices. He was able to see where they were coming from: there four men, pinned up against and holding on to a brick wall, water neck high and rising.

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"If they had let go, they would've been swept away," Amy Dardis said.

Brian Dardis was standing in the back of his house Monday night, on a raised patio walkway. The men were on the other side of a brick wall, in the neighbor's backyard.

One by one, he coaxed each man into climbing over the wall, and one by one he yanked them up by their coats.

No easy feat, to be sure, and complicated -- but only slightly -- by the fact the four men didn't speak the Dardis' native tongue.

"They had no English, we had no Spanish, but everyone spoke fear," Amy said.

After some back and forth, it was determined the men worked in town, two on the pier and two at Gabriella's restaurant. They were living at the La Fontana Motel, and had decided to get to higher ground.

Instead, they got swept away in the water and somehow, some way, into the arms of Brian Dardis, and from there into Amy's kitchen.

"We stripped them down, sat them down, gave them food and coffee and whatnot, and they spent the night. The next morning, they offered us $20 each, but of course we refused," she said.

From there, handshakes and hugs, and off they went. They wouldn't stay. They all insisted on leaving. They also insisted on not putting their shoes on in the Dardis' house.

"They wouldn't put them on because they were wet," Amy Dardis said.

Good manners survived Sandy. As did the Dardises and their houseguests.

"I would've left if I could do it again," Amy Dardis said. "But we stayed, and these guys were saved."

Next up for the couple? Getting their power, water and everything else back.

As of Thursday, there was 6 inches of sand -- grasp that thought for a second, as remember, we're talking two blocks from the beach -- as far as she could see, and the end of this ordeal is not yet in her line of sight.

"But we want to stay. We want to start getting things back together. This is our home," she said.

Well, Amy, here's to a speedy rebuilding, here's to getting the sand back to where it belongs, and here's to you and your husband. Nice to save a few lives every now and again.